Customer Reviews

The Physicists: A Play

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Three physicists have been confined to a very expensive posh mental institution, Les Cerisiers. Herbert George Beutler says he is Isaac Newton, but he knows that he is really Einstein. He adopted the guise of Newton to avoid upsetting another patient, Ernst Heinrich Ernesti, who claims he is Einstein. The third, Johann Wilhelm Mobius is himself. As a long term patient, he enjoys frequent visions of King Solomon.

I had the great fortune of knowing little about the plot. I was continuously entertained by the playful unraveling of a murder mystery. I urge you to avoid learning more. The imagination of Durrenmatt is quite remarkable. He weaves an entertainingly unpredictable story.

This short play warrants reading more than once, even more than twice, as the Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt not only entertains us, but explores fundamental questions regarding the role of science in modern society. The Physicists was written in 1962 when the world faced the possibility of nuclear war at any moment. The Physicists has been produced at the London Royal Court Theatre, on Broadway, and by many university theatre departments. I intend to become acquainted with the plays of Friedrich Durrenmatt.

I originally read this play some time ago while studying German in college and it is one of the few works from those years that has "stuck with me". In fact I still have the German language edition that I used at that time.
As other reviewers have said, one of the central themes of this work is the degree of responsibility that scientists have to humanity or something called "the public". Having worked for over twenty years now as a nuclear scientist, I can definitely say that at times the desire for knowledge can override the consideration of all the possible uses of a given technology. The question them becomes, can an idea be "unthought"? This secondary theme of the book is intertwined with the theory of the inevitability of ideas at a given time and place.
The translation by Kirkup is quite good as compared to the original German version that I have. Though the expository style (some very long dialogs) may be a bit daunting at times, stick with it. This play is a philosophical discussion, not a Hollywood action film.

Durrenmatt's play provides an excellent and thought-provoking critique on the role of modern science and technology in human affairs. Is science responsible to humanity? If we deem specific knowledge "harmful", how can we hope to prevent its discovery? If the knowledge does exist, how do we prevent its misuse? This is a play that is incredibly relevant in an age plagued with similar issues in genetic engineering and cloning. I'd highly recommend the German translation.

Without giving away too much:
Its's the story of a Physicist that is seeking refuge in a insane assylum to protect himself and the 'formula' he found. This formula may change the world as we know it. HE is trapped with two spies that try to get the formula. All of them pretend to be famous physicists. Then a nurse is murdered ...

A classical drama. Everything happens in one room in the insane asylum. It is easy to get confused by the different characters. Every 'Physicist' has three identities: 'real' (spy, physicist), 'pretended' (announced in public, famous physicist), 'pretended in privat' (other famous physicist, pretended in private conversations). It's nice to have seen the play first.

If you know german: read the original (Die Physiker).

Durrenmatt is not well known outside of Switzerland/Germany/Austria. A great author. If you are looking for something easier, try 'Der Richter und sein Henker' (The judge and his executioner?) or 'Der Verdacht' (The suspision?). Too bad that neither book is available here. Available here: 'The Assignement'. Easier to read than 'The Physicists' but not as good.

To get the ultimate: 'Achterloo'. One of the best plays I have ever seen but was allways afraid to read. Again: An insane asylum. But this time it is populated with different historical personalities (Cardinal Richelieu (sp?), General Jaruselzki, Napoleon ...). Great dialogs!

The Physicists (1962) is difficult to categorize, a conglomeration of conflicting theater genres -mystery, melodrama, farce, morality play. There is an admitted affinity between the theater of Swiss playwright Durrenmatt and the theater of Brecht but Durrenmatt was very much his own man.

A common vein runs through much of Durrenmatt's work: to expose hypocrisy, the twistings and turnings that otherwise respectable people go through to justify self-interest in supposedly `moral' terms. This preoccupation is seen clearly in his best known play, The Visit (1956), which premiered in New York with America's foremost acting couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontaine, playing the leads: an elderly woman returns to her hometown and offers fabulous wealth to the town's inhabitants on one condition: that they execute the lover who abandoned her years before, though he is guilty of no offense but having spurned her. It shows also in Durrenmatt's philosophical detective stories, The Judge and His Hangman (1952) and The Pledge (1958), in both of which detecting takes second place to musings on the human condition, and in particular our tendency to pursue self-aggrandizement to the detriment of moral obligation.

The Physicists is considered a modern classic in German-speaking countries. Three madmen, all physicists -Sir Isaac Newton, Alfred Einstein and a nonentity named Mobius--inhabit a special wing of a Swiss hospital for the insane. Its proprietor is a hunchbacked psychiatrist, the last of a long line of distinguished but utterly mad financiers and military men. The police have been called in for the second time in two months: one of the physicists (Einstein) has just murdered his nurse. The inspector arrives. The mad man who calls himself Newton sits down with the inspector and tells him in confidence that he's really not Newton, he's Einstein but he doesn't want to make his true identity public because it would upset the other madman who says he's Einstein -and that man is truly insane. Another madman, Mobius emerges from his room and announces in stentorian tones that King Solomon has just appeared to him in all his glory. When Mobius's wife confronts him to tell she's divorced him and married a Bible-thumping missionary who is now going to take her off to the Marianas, it doesn't faze Mobius. When his nurse falls for him, Mobius cautions her that it is too dangerous for her to love him and then suffocates her. Things become more and more complicated. And more. More.

There are many comic moments in the play but The Physicists is a serious play about a very serious topic: mutually assured destruction (MAD), and the role scientists played in making MAD possible in the 1950s and early 1960s. Nuclear proliferation was a major issue then: it was, after all, the era of the Cuban missile crisis and the Iron Curtain. But has the urgency of this issue faded with the decades? A quick look at today's world --Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, the threat of pocket bombs-- suggests not. The strengths of the play are its idiosyncratic characters, the plentiful twists and turns of its plot, and hidden puns sprinkled throughout the play: the sanatorium, for instance, is located in Les Cerisiers, French for `cherry orchard' a la Chekhov's great play. And the Mobius of the play? Is he an echo of the Mobius who invented the Mobius strip, a two dimensional-strip that doubles back on itself, joining opposite sides of a sheet of paper together in one flat but twisty plane, so that both sides are now really one side? That would certainly be a fitting choice for a play that constantly veers from reality to fantasy and back again.

The Physicists makes you laugh but it also makes you think. Which is not a bad combination for one play!

Friedrich Duerrenmatt appended "21 Points to THE PHYSICISTS," and in Point 14 he insisted that, "A drama about physicists must be paradoxical." His next point stated that, "It cannot have as its goal the content of physics but its effect." Duerrenmatt's 1962 play (which was translated into English from the original German in 1963 and then appeared on Broadway) succeeds most memorably by adhering to these two points (and his other nineteen which are printed in this edition as well).

THE PHYSICISTS features three characters who make claims to being the famed physicists Newton, Einstein and Moebius. These three toddle into the action as unpredictably as individual gas molecules move in a heated, sealed container as the play utilizes bizarre happenings in an old section of a sanitarium to examine the potential destructive power of physics (and by extension, all branches of science) and the moral and ethical dilemmas arising from that. Plot twists and turns abound as the main characters -- and some minor ones -- change like chameleons and the contexual frame of reference is turned repeatedly on its head.

THE PHYSICISTS will soon reach the half-century mark, but its themes continue to be relevant as twenty-first century scientists and the public at large confront an ever widening arena of scientific "advances" that could conceivably unleash immense, even catastrophic, repercussions. As Duerrenmatt says in Point 19, "Within the paradoxical appears reality." Within the play, one can see truths for our times.

Anyone who has seen or read the more recent plays COPENHAGEN or PROOF will probably find THE PHYSICISTS a great read.

I purchased this as part of a class I was taking in graduate school.

The play is short and interesting. It is something I feel should be read to help spark a group discussion about science, business, and social responsibility. It's definitely worth a read.

If I had to grade it I'd give it a B+.

"the physicists" is a delightful short play that our amateur theater group staged years and years ago, in which i played the part of einstein.

in the play, a manaical doctor virtually imprisons famous scientists in the hope of getting her hands on the "unified theory" which would explain all scientific and natural phenomena and would therefore make her rich beyond anyone's dreams.

but needless to say, her plans go awry ... (i shall not divulge any more of the storyline!)

what made me look for this play at this time? i remembered from my lines that einstein was born in ulm, and my wife and i were taking a river cruise down the danube ... we didn't go to ulm, though; the nearest we got to it was vilshofen.

i was glad to find the book!

I want all of you to read this play. It is weird butfascinating, surprising and just brilliant. Get to know Germanliterature at one of its best!